Secrets abound in Lorna's family. Her mother Marika, who survived the Nazi occupation of Holland, abandoned the family when Lorna and her brother Wade were just seven and twelve years old. The reason she left, and her whereabouts afterward, were shrouded in mystery. As is a darker secret Marika has repressed for nearly seventy years.
Originally published in Great Britain in 2013 by the Penguin Group.
Strikingly different since childhood and leading dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have managed to remain devoted --as long as they stay on opposite coasts. When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her idyllic New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include the sisters' long-estranged father. Cynthia, however, doesn't understand how Frances can ignore the past their father's presence revives, a past that includes suspicions about their mother's death twenty-five years earlier.
Ein Mann, eine Frau, zwei Kinder: In das Leben einer nicht unkomplizierten Familie tritt als Hilfe und Entlastung ein neues Kindermädchen, eine wahre Perle, die putzt, bäckt und bastelt. Offensichtlich weiß sie besser als die überanstrengten Eltern, was gut für die Kinder ist. Doch ihre Perfektion wirkt nachgerade unheimlich. Im Lauf der Zeit spitzen sich die Dinge zu - auch zwischen den Ehepartnern -, bis sich die Spannungen gewaltsam entladen. Suzanne Bernes beunruhigendes Buch beschwört auf verständnisvolle und intelligente Weise das Drama von Eltern, insbesondere von Müttern, die versuchen, Beruf und Familie in Einklang zu bringen.
The second novel by the author of the Orange Prize winning A Crime in the Neighbourhood is set in a Boston suburb a year or so after the infamous nanny scandal broke.
An auspicious debut novel by a young writer who will remind readers of Anne Lamott and Anne TylerCrime in the Neighborhood centers on a headline event-- the molestation and murder of a twelve-year-old boy in a Washington, D.C., suburb. At the time of the murder, 1973, Marsha was nine years old and as an adult she still remembers that summer as a time when murder and her own family's upheaval were intertwined. Everyone, it seemed to Marsha at the time, was committing crimes. Her father deserted his family to take up with her mother's younger sister. Her teenage brother and sister were smoking and shoplifting, and her mother was "flirting" with Mr. Green, the new next-door neighbor. Even the president of the United States seemed to be a crook. But it is Marsha's own suspicions about who committed this crime that has the town up in arms and reveals what happens when fear runs wild.